Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

Minister, I think it would be quite useful for you to actually listen to this because you are going to have to vote on it as well. I will bet pounds to peanuts this is not a piece of legislation that you are across, so perhaps for your own peace of mind you might want to pay a little attention to some of the discussion. Then you might have a rather more informed view.

We have no advice from the department. We have no idea from the department what that common practice definition is going to be. So how can people determine whether or not they support this piece of legislation when they simply do not know how it is going to work? We simply do not know. This government is being at best presumptuous, at worst arrogant, asking the Senate to vote on this legislation without the necessary detail.

I also note that, during that committee inquiry process, the department put forward their current determination around the methodologies. Methodologies are, quite simply, what farmers are going to be able to do to sequester carbon in the soil that will be counted, that they will be able to get a credit for. What Ms Thompson put forward on that day was:

The government is working with stakeholders to develop methodologies for soil carbon, reduction in livestock emissions and applications in the rangelands.

This was on 20 April, only a few weeks ago. So, as we have discussed, we have no idea what the common practice definition is going to be and we have no idea of the methodologies, of what farmers are actually going to be able to do that will be counted. As I said, that was as little as just a few weeks ago. And we certainly do not have it in front of us in the chamber today to be able to determine the efficacy of the legislation: to determine whether or not this is actually going to work and whether or not people out in the regional areas are actually going to be able to gain a benefit from this.

When officials were again asked about the common practice definition, the department put forward the view that it might be region by region. When asked if a farming practice is going to be common practice if it is something that is common across the country, if it is going to be something that is determined on a state basis or if it is going to be something determined in another way, the department said that it might be on a region-by-region basis. From that we took it that if it was not really well used in one region then it might count; if it was used primarily and overwhelmingly in another region then obviously it would not count. But we had no information given to us on what the definition of the regions would be and how that would work, or of what the cut-off figure would be for what is common practice. Is it 10 farmers out of 100, or 10 farmers out of a thousand, or one farmer out of a thousand? We simply do not know. And the fact that we do not know is the reason we cannot support this bill. We simply cannot support it because we do not know what is contained within the bill, because we have not seen the regulations.

In relation to the positive and negative lists, the positives are the things that the government is going to include and the negatives are things that, in essence, are not good for those communities so they will be excluded from being able to be counted. Again, we have very little by way of information on how these lists are going to look. We simply do not have the info­rmation. The positive list is going to be of the abatement activities or types of projects that are determined by the minister not to be common practice. The negative list is going to be of those excluded projects which have significant adverse impacts, and the govern­ment has said they will include adverse impacts on prime agricultural land, water availability and biodiversity. That sounds fine, but when you actually get to the legislation—